The world will reach 4 billion mobile phone users mark in 2018

The GSMA is out with a new report titled “The Mobile Economy 2013”, providing us with a comprehensive overview of the mobile industry today. At the same time, the report also outlines key opportunities and challenges for the industry over the next five years.

Developed by the GSMA and A.T. Kearney, the wide-ranging study shares quite a few interesting numbers. Here are the highlights:

Globally, there are 3.2 billion mobile users, which is nearly half of the world’s population. A further 700 million subscribers will be added by 2017 and the 4 billion-subscriber milestone will be reached in 2018.

The mobile industry is a major contributor to the global economy with its revenues accounting for $1.6 trillion, or 2.2% of global GDP.

For the period through 2017, the mobile industry will invest $1.1 trillion in capital expenditure and will contribute $2.6 trillion to public funding.

In 2017, companies across the ecosystem will employ nearly 10 million people globally.

Last year ended with 6.8 billion mobile connections worldwide, and that number will grow to 9.7 billion by the end of 2017.

Mobile broadband accounted for 1.6 billion of these connections in 2012, increasing to 5.1 billion in 2017, including 920 million LTE connections.

In 2012, 0.9 exabytes of data traversed mobile networks every month, and the figure will increase by 66% to 11.2 exabytes per month in 2017.

And you can get more details from the full report, available from here.